Ixia
(Nasdaq: XXIA) today announced the company’s
continued
participation in Cyber Endeavor, the United States Pacific Command’s
paramount cyber security collaboration, familiarization and engagement
...

Pacific Endeavor at Cyber Endeavor is an interoperability cyber war exercise for military communication systems held annually since 2004. The mission of the event is to build collaboration among technology providers and government and nongovernment organizations, to develop core competencies, and to offer in-depth exploration of aspects of providing confidentiality, integrity and availability of critical communications. Additionally, the exercises are done to harden current communication infrastructures to be resilient in the face of cyber attack and train personnel to recognize threats and avert attacks before damage occurs and communications systems are interrupted.

Ixia BreakingPoint cyber range solutions and cyber security experts were used during Pacific Endeavor to create cyber war conditions and:

Battle-test current network devices and systems in order to harden their resiliency to both recreational and malicious traffic while remaining stable and delivering communications.

Validate current cyber security test methodologies to validate the future performance of network devices such as next-generation firewall, firewall, application identification, IPS, antivirus, antimalware, antispyware and others to function against advanced persistent threats and the very latest attacks.

Identify the potential limits and vulnerabilities of current network infrastructure and optimize it for ultimate performance.

Train military personnel.

Commentary on Pacific Endeavor Cyber Security Exercises

"Pacific Endeavor enables the 22 partner-nation participants to immediately put into use the information received, to enhance overall information assurance and harden computer network defenses,” said Scott Griffin, GS-13 U.S. Pacific Command, J651 Technical Director, Multinational Communications Interoperability Program (MCIP). He added, “Ixia, along with CICRA and Naval Postgraduate School, presented hands-on facilitation during the second week of Cyber Endeavor, leading the cyber range training session by incorporating Green-, Red- and Blue-team aspects of network management and protection. This framework enforced key processes and technologies and further developed capacities of the participants to maintain and defend critical network infrastructures during humanitarian assistance and disaster response.”

“Hardening cyber security defenses and training military personnel to become cyber warriors demands the types of exercises led by Pacific Endeavor at Cyber Endeavor,” said Gregory Fresnais, international director, business development for EMEA and APAC, Ixia. “Pacific Endeavor allowed the Ixia BreakingPoint cyber range solutions, along with our highly experienced cyber range team, to quickly create the exact conditions needed to battle test infrastructure and people and transform them both to be resilient in the face of attack. At the end of the exercises we were able to provide the participants an understanding of the current threat landscape and knowledge on how to better defend and protect their networks and cyber domains.”

Pacific Endeavor at Cyber Endeavor used Ixia BreakingPoint cyber range solutions to create the behavior of millions of users, and blended real-world applications, live cyber attacks and malformed traffic. These real-world scenarios, run by the Ixia team, provided a variety of benefits to Green-, Red- and Blue-team exercises:

Green team: Employed the Ixia BreakingPoint solutions to simulate legitimate user communications, using more than 180 applications and accessing the same number of simulated application servers hosted on the network infrastructure managed by the Blue team.

Red team: Used the Ixia BreakingPoint solutions to simulate malicious users sending malicious traffic to the network infrastructure, using more than 5,000 network attacks and more than 28,000 pieces of live malware.

Bringing together all three elements of this exercise allowed participants to identify current infrastructure vulnerabilities, optimize performance and security, and ultimately train personnel to react correctly while under attack in order to keep communication channels running.